Stand by This Faith, Rally, March

After Election Day, I continued to wear my ‘Love Trumps Hate’ button and also added a safety pin to my lapel for good measure. Beyond politics and personalities, I believe that certain principles generally hold true. On the eve of Thanksgiving, while I was riding an express train home on NYC transit wearing both button and pin, a man and his male friend got on at Penn Station. This man was well-dressed and a little older; he took the seat right next to mine on the subway, so our wretched encounter would be pointedly personal.

“I’m glad that b*tch lost,” he said, then turned to his friend. “A f*ck*ng female president. What a joke! It’s a good thing Trump won the election.” Is it? Hillary Rodham Clinton apparently won the popular vote by more than 2.5 million, the largest margin in decades. This means that the majority of Americans were indeed ‘with her’ and shared her vision of an inclusive civil society, much as I did. The first woman nominated by a major political party somehow won the vote decisively and lost the election definitively.

The loathing that has been found voice since Trump won the Electoral College count has been deeply disturbing to a significant number of Americans. The misogyny is striking. ‘Lock her up’ is more than a rotten little bit of sloganeering begun on the campaign trail; it is essentially a 21st-century version of ‘Burn the witch’. Notice how much vitriol that slogan has emboldened, along with psychic violence against women nationwide. As a New Yorker, I supposedly live in a liberal bastion in the marvelous ‘blue bubble’, but that seems to have burst in November 2016.

Not only was this male straphanger’s harangue meant to humiliate me, it was an orchestrated effort to me back in my place in an attempt to ‘make America great again’. Obviously, I’m a “f*ck*ng female” just like “that b*tch”; most women could easily decode those sentiments. I kept quiet as he continued to talk loudly and disparagingly about me and my kind in his profanity-laced tirade, but his tone communicated most clearly his feelings toward women. They were – in a word – hateful. When our train pulled into 96th St., as I was exiting, I told him: “You’re a prince among men.”

This toxic dynamic goes far beyond any battle of the sexes – this is the very public airing of sexist attitudes that endorse the open contempt for and the flagrant denigration of women. This includes all women, immigrant and native-born, every shade of us. The widespread mansplaining of 2016 election results has grown tiresome; we have little confusion left about how the prospect of “a f*ck*ng female” presidency in this country was received. Recent statistics have shown an uptick in hate crimes nationwide, as well an increase in calls to crisis and suicide hotlines. Thank God there are people to take those calls.

Only days after my unsavory subway ride, over that long Thanksgiving weekend, a male passenger on a Delta Air Lines flight out of Atlanta launched into drunken invective about the President-Elect, yelling, “Come on, baby – Trump!” Standing in the center aisle of the plane, he demanded to know: “We got some Hillary b*tch*s on here?” The closing image of that viral cellphone footage is a shot of young woman looking directly into the camera, her face stricken. To its credit, Delta permanently banned him from its airline and refunded each passenger the price of her ticket. But for too many women, moving through particular public spheres in America is a punishing proposition, an assault on their senses as well as their dignity.

Like HRC declared herself in that gracious concession speech, I remain grateful to be an American. Certainly I know I am afforded rights and opportunities that women elsewhere are woefully denied. But I cannot concede that we’re anywhere near our stated goal of a democratic franchise with greater equality between the sexes. Lately, a joke’s been making the rounds that it’s hard to shatter the highest glass ceiling when it has steel reinforcements -it’s painfully funny because it’s painfully true.

Recently, a ministerial colleague of mine was visiting a ‘square state’ in the middle of reddest America, when she was spied wearing her clerical collar. She was approached respectfully by a stranger there. “What do I call you?” this man asked her. “I’ve never seen one of you before.” She replied simply: “Reverend”. This notion that we should all have reverence for one another remains a bit of oddity, though, especially if involves men revering women.

My Universalist tradition was the first to ordain a female minister with full denominational authority in the United States. Tellingly, the Rev. Olympia Brown ended her esteemed career as a committed suffragist and at the age of 85, in November 1920, cast her first ballot following the ratification of 19th Amendment. She’s long been a personal hero of mine, and the responsive reading at my ordination service a decade ago was taken from one of her rousing public addresses:

Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before us the loftiest ideals, which has comforted us in sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful. Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message, that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost.

Now that great and true principle might best be summed up as “Love Trumps Hate”. Frankly, the issue could not be less partisan – each of us, male and female, is asked stand united on the side of life and love and openly opposed to forces of hate and division.

Standing by my faith will mean my marching on Washington on Jan. 21, 2017, alongside hundreds of thousands of other American women. Call us whatever pejorative comes immediately to mind: “b*tch*s” or p—–s or ‘nasty’ women, but know that we will remain loyal to our inviolable truths. It’s actually possible to look at a woman and see her as something more than an assemblage of body parts rated on a scale of 1-10. Someone might even look at a woman and see in her visage the face of God, conceivably, or the rightful leader of the free world.

Now we are confronted with a ferocious backlash against our growing certitude that indeed, “women’s rights are human rights”. Yet what’s coming next is a resolute and unyielding pushback to that backlash, and I’ll gladly join others in working for it and sacrificing for it. Trust me: I am not going to waste my precious space here, not in my city, nation, or world, not at this day and time. If you join us at the Capitol next month, you will see me wearing my clerical collar and ministerial stole, along with that same old button and the safety pin in my lapel, expressing my spiritual solidarity with those who share a belief that we are already strong enough and still stronger together.

‘Love Trumps Hate’, really and truly, and it will eventually defeat the blatant misogyny, male supremacy, and patriarchal privilege that unapologetically sprawls across our national stage. But we need to plan for the long game here, and we cannot merely play at it for an election cycle; the stakes are too high, and we – women of these United States and all the men who happen to care about them – have to be in it to win it. We need to ride our subways, buy our train tickets, take our seats on the bus, board those airplanes, move forward, and rally.

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Altogether Good!

Only someone who travels can talk about the places they’ve been; all the others can only imagine what is over the next hill, who they’ll meet one day. The Reverend Dr. has walked the walk, and talks the talk of experience... The religious universe is blessed to have such a keen mind and open heart within its matrix; those whom she counsels undoubtedly receive wise guidance as her kindness comes through... Reverend Dr., long may you walk this path you’ve chosen! It is altogether good (for us, and for you) that you chose it.
- M.T. Heath